This year I moved. Not only from Arizona to Wisconsin, but also from from eleven years at a K-8 school to a high school outside of Milwaukee. One of the biggest adjustments (believe me there have been many) I have adapted to is the amount of time the counselors are able to spend in classrooms. With a school of 1400 students and four counselors we simply cannot get into classrooms as regularly as I did with the younger students. We still have standards to teach and information to get across to each of our students, but significantly less face time with our kids. Our team has struggled with this and found the solution through flipped lessons.
What are Flipped Lessons? Wikipedia describes flipping lessons as an “instructional strategy and a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional educational arrangement by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom. It moves activities, including those that may have traditionally been considered homework, into the classroom. In a flipped classroom, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions, or carry out research at home and engage in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of the instructor.”
I had heard about this approach to teaching after reading an article in the ASCA School Counselor Magazine in the Spring of 2015 by Dr. Erin Mason. Dr. Mason of DePaul University explains how flipped lessons and School Counseling can go hand in hand
“If school counselors are to reach all students, then a strong delivery format for core school counseling curriculum lessons is a necessity. Flipping the delivery of large-group or classroom lessons may help alleviate some of the day-to-day challenges of school counselors, who often feel pulled in many different directions. More importantly, using a flipped approach may lead to more consistent content delivery and provide more effective and efficient classroom interactions between school counselors and students.”
After researching how other school counseling programs have utilized flipped lessons my team decided to give it a try. One of our goals this year is to get information about Safe Schools (a.k..a Bullying Prevention) out to all of our students. Doing this face to face through classrooms lessons was simply not an option for us, due to time. So we flipped it and delivered the lesson during our students’ daily Resource Time (homeroom).
How We Did It
Flipping a lesson is so much easier than I thought it would be. We began with a Pre-Test/Needs Assessment for all 1400 students. We administered this through Google Forms. Thankfully, our students are 1:1 with Chromebooks so this piece may not be as easy for others without this perk. Once we had the results of this survey we knew exactly what information our students needed from us so we created a Prezi Presentation (a Powerpoint would work too but Prezis are much prettier). Once the Prezi was complete I googled “How to Voice Over a Prezi”. (My favorite way of answering my own technology questions is to simply google it or find a ‘how to’ video on YouTube). I could never have imagined how easy this piece is. Using the Sound Recorder on our computers (you can also use sites like Vocacroo), we recorded our voices than saved the voiceovers onto our computers. Prezi has a super easy way of uploading the voiceover into each slide (right click ‘Add Voiceover’). Each counselor took a certain number of slides to create and voiceover and we were done! We shared the Prezi with Resource Teachers who then showed it in class on a specific date. I enjoyed walking the halls that morning to see all 1400 students receiving a counseling lesson simultaneously. I’ll admit, this is not the most ideal situation, but it is much better than trying to juggle nearly a hundred lessons and definitely better than not getting the information to our students at all! We’ve taken this concept and created “flipped lessons” for our Junior Parent Night, Senior Seminar Series and Financial Aid information and uploaded them onto our website for families to use at their leisure.
To see our Flipped Lessons visit our website at http://tinyurl.com/fhs-counselors. Also See how Francine Sabens in Illinois used a Flipped Lesson for Course Registration at her high school here. http://tinyurl.com/ChesterHSRegistration
I’d be happy to share more information about this or other ways to incorporate technology into your school counseling program. Feel free to contact me at [email protected]
Resources
The Flipped Learning Network
Edutopia Flipped Learning Resources
Flipped Classrooms. In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 10, 2015 from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
Mason, E., K Gupta, M. Sowers, F. Sabens (2015, March). Flip Your Lessons, ASCA School Counselor Magazine